The Lord of the Rings

I have read The Lord of the Rings more than twenty times. I remember reading it for the first time, with rapt attention, while at a stranger's house, where my mother was choosing my Bar Mitzvah invitations. I remember reading bits of it to my future wife as she fell asleep, camped illegally on a beach in a distant country, and I remember reading it years later to friends each night as we huddled around a wood stove in a freezing house, rationing out our Frangelico. Mostly though, unceremonious as it was, I just read it, with pleasure, anywhere, even well after I had, in my way, memorized it.

I loved its high heroism, its glorious vistas and settings that were all rich and organic in the telling of the story, its lore, its travelogue with desperate purpose structure, its basic disinterest in its villains, and its brilliant central conceit, a ring of great power that will corrupt anyone who wants it, uses it, or claims it. Whatever Tolkien may have said, that last is such a rich analogy to the fundamental, and likely fatal, problem of humanity, our profound difficulty in rejecting and resisting power, and the impossibility of not being corrupted by it.

I am not unaware of The Lord of the Ring's flaws. Though Galadriel and Eowyn make up for much in their brief page time, it is sorely lacking in female characters. Its weirdly simplified feudalism and utopian class structures make for a paper thin under layer to the world. The characters lack a resonating depth, partly from that. No one really seems to make the world work. These all are necessary to all that works so perfectly in The Lord of the Rings, its distillations of epic struggles, of goodness, but they are its glossy flaws as well. It's an extraordinarily powerful adventure story, a giant fable, but these things, these flaws, give just a tiny bit of a shaky feeling when one starts raving on about it as Literature, the kind where it sits at the top of Hundred Greatest Books lists.

But whatever it is about The Lord of the Rings for me, I had thought it was a done deal. I was clear on all of the above and I was clear that the defining pleasure in the book(s) was the purity of its heroism. After so many years and readings I did not think that all of a sudden something new, a new pleasure would leap out at me. And I certainly didn't think it would happen while I was not reading the trilogy, and not even really thinking about it. And yet it did. I woke up this morning and out of nowhere was struck with a new thought about these books.

What I woke up this morning thinking was that the hobbits are a disaster! They make mistake after mistake. I was so caught up in everyone's heartrending bravery and against the odds heroism that I didn't even notice! Allow me to run down a brief catalog of the hobbits' mistakes. They wait too long to leave the Shire. They're lured in by old man willow. They have an extremely ill advised nap on the Barrow Downs. Pippin tells inappropriate stories in Bree and is followed by Frodo's even more disastrous dance on a table immediately thereafter. Merry goes for an imprudent walk right around then too. Frodo puts on the ring on Weathertop. Pippin horribly tosses a stone into a well in Moria. Fool of a Took! Merry and Pippin run wild into the woods at the company's parting. Pippin steals the Plantir to look in it. Sam and Frodo trust Smeagol just a bit too much at Cirith Ungol. Sam fails to check Frodo's heartbeat. Frodo claims the ring at the Cracks of Doom.

It is a litany of disasters large and small, and yet, until this morning, it never particularly occurred to me that they made any notable mistakes at all! I found something about all of this kind of cheering. Something like, if with good heart, and real purpose, you persist, against all odds, something will come out right in the tale of it all, if you go far enough along.

Something like: It's amazing how much you can get done merely by not getting killed.

Another blog you might enjoy

A quiet night at the front desk of the Library. Christmas season mellows things out around here. My co-worker was very excited about a new book by a famous blogger that had come in for her. It's a very amusing blogger, but I won't be sharing this blogger's name with you in a fit of jealous pique.

Oh, do you want a quality blogger recommendation from me?

GO TO CLERKMANIFESTO.COM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oops, sorry. I sometimes suffer from malarial like outbreaks of fame deficit syndrome. I'm okay now. I feel much better.

Anyway, I was looking at this blogger's book, on a quiet night at the front desk, and just as I was starting to rather like the book against all my petty inclinations I had a weird feeling that I should look up. So I did. Forty seven people were patiently waiting in line watching me read.

Yes, that's the whole story.

If you're unsatisfied with it you might like that other famous blogger better. What was her name again?

Your brain on teen literature

The teen librarian had an experience he felt might feature well on my blog. I was more keen on exclusive internet rights to his semi-famous Top Ten Books of the Year list. Perhaps this is some kind of test case for the 2014 list. Hmm.

Let us begin with the story, short as it is, unvarnished. Our teen librarian had been seeing a bumper sticker around town a lot lately. Here is what he took it to say, over and over:
 
LOVE PEOPLE. COOK THEM. TASTY FOOD!
 
He thought that this bumper sticker was a wry, quietly funny, zombie inspired bumper sticker, and was amused by its cleverness until, just recently he realized that the bumper sticker actually said:

LOVE PEOPLE. COOK THEM TASTY FOOD.
 
The punctuation change steers us so dramatically out of the land of cannibalism that it makes for a nice little, funny story. However, since my blog thrives on rich social commentary, I needed a way to contextualize this story. I immediately delved into my associations with this story.

My first association with this story was to the book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, which is one of a very select group of bestsellers about punctuation. All of the sudden I can't quite think of any of the other bestsellers about punctuation. Other than being a good title for a possible sequel to that book it was clear I should look into my second association for inspiration.

My second association was to a Damon Knight story that was made into a Twilight Zone episode. It was called To Serve Man. Close your eyes for awhile if you were planning on reading or watching this anytime soon because we are talking major spoilers ahead. Okay? In To Serve Man, very kind and powerful aliens come to earth. They have a book with them called To Serve Man as a sort of guide or Bible. This helps people trust these super powerful and helpful aliens even more. But at the end of the story our hero learns that To Serve Man is not a guidebook, it's a cookbook! You can see why I'd associate the stories. Unfortunately it does not serve to illuminate the teen librarian's story.

Finally, at a bit of a loss, I started thinking of poor Marcus, the teen librarian, out in our teen room, isolated back there, buying all those books about vampires and zombies and werewolves, witches and demigods, driving around to teen prisons to give talks. Posing for the covers of national librarian magazines and choosing master lists of all the YA graphic novels for libraries everywhere to purchase. I think of him going over to high schools and conferences and meetings in scattered cities and everywhere he goes seeing these weird zombie bumper stickers, "love people, cook them!", just everywhere. And I had a moment of shocking insight. Marcus is not long for us here. Some clever, fancy library system is going to snatch up our star librarian to be their library director. I give it a year, year and a half, tops. And he'll be a good one too, a really good Library Director, I mean, after some quiet time. A lot of quiet time.

The Charlie Brown Christmas CD is not for everyone.

I accept that there are quite a few jazz albums as great as A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. And I admit even that there might be a small handful of jazz CDs, ones that I could even name, that are, end to end, better than A Charlie Brown Christmas, I mean, if we're going to get all ranky about things here. But I do contend there is no jazz more dazzlingly pleasurable than this 45 minutes or so of music, nothing that so much makes a person want to do a tiny, silly Peanuts dance of pleasure when hearing it. You do your little dance move, and back again, and start over in a four second loop. You are an animated Peanuts character of pure joy.

I have been playing this enchanting music pretty regularly over the last few days, whenever I am on the coveted phones work assignment at my job, and, vastly more than any music I have ever played there, people react with great enthusiasm to it. They don't just experience the joy of recognition ("Are you playing the Peanut's Christmas? Excellent!"), but they stop and listen for a bit, they do the dance, they reminisce.

At one point I was so delighted by this music, and so amazed by the happiness it seemed to be bringing to everyone, that I started to wonder if it was an odd, localized phenomenon, coincidence, or something truly universal. So I looked up the CD on Amazon. It had almost 700 reviews. The average rating was 4.8 stars. But ah, what are these one star reviews ruining its perfect rating? Every single one of them, and also every one of the two star ones, had to do with versions of the CD and its sound quality. No one had a single hard word for the music itself. "Oh my goodness," I thought, "everyone in the world actually loves this music." I was frankly amazed. I felt a sudden need to share my amazement. Unfortunately, absolutely no one was around me, so I ventured off to find someone to tell.

The first person I found, out at the front desk, was perhaps the very most positive person of all my co workers, a talker (like me!), an extremely nice person, an enthusiastic and idiosyncratic lover of all kinds of culture, and the perfect sort of person to share this happy news with.

"Oh my god!" I cried "I have just discovered that everyone in the whole world loves Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas!"

It turns out that it is kind of hard to describe the facial expression I am wanting to explain to you here. It should have a name, because you would totally know this expression. It's not a frown exactly. It's when you pull down the corners of your mouth by tightening your neck muscles, all in a way that then sort of makes these ligament kind of things stick out in your neck. I know that makes it sound horrible, but it's a common enough, normal expression. It's an "uh oh" expression. This is the expression my co worker made. 

"I have just discovered that not everyone in the whole world loves Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas?" I asked.

My co worker explained. 

Once upon a time she worked in a big Downtown Hotel. They had a woman who played piano in the lobby, I'm not sure if this was all the time, or just Christmas time. The woman grinned maniacally the whole time she played. This woman played a lot of Peanut's Christmas music as she was grinning maniacally, but never so much as when my co worker was around. She would play A Charlie Brown Christmas, grinning maniacally, all as a sort of response to the presence of my co worker. This began to sort of unnerve my co worker, giving her unpleasant associations with said music, and causing her to become distinctly unenamored of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I understand. Music is geology. As you become familiar with a piece of music it's like a layer of sediment is laying down in you. When you encounter that music later the weight of time will have compressed it into a solidified layer. Embedded inextricably into that layer will be all kinds of stray feelings and events and sensations that became caught, by chance, location, and temporality, in that music. Hearing that music again, later, will tend to be paleontological, or archeological. You may find nothing but the music, yet too you may find a dream of lit up shop windows on a dark cold night in a city, the pleasures of Peanuts characters come to life. You may find a delirious but delicious fantasy of anticipation, peace, wishes granted, freedom. You may find presents, longing, the dream of a past that never happened. And so too you may find the giant skeleton of a maniacal piano player, grinning up at you as you chip and dust the sediment out of its enormous eye socket. The world is so large in every direction. We must ever remain prepared to hand over our absolutes for everything, everything, even the delightfulness of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

kafka's kart

Some part of me thinks that if kafka could talk he would insist that I never spell C-words with a K when continuing from his name, like "kafka's kart". But kafka, a cat, cannot talk. That, curiously, does not mean I am free to contravene his requests and requirements. It means that the collective discussion is cast completely clear of his concerns. Kafka does not care. Contradistinctly, of course, one can never be correspondingly completely confident correlatively with a cat.

Which brings us to the cart.

As mentioned in an earlier post my library recently acquired eight shopping carts. They are of a size suitable for a small to medium sized shop at your local grocery store. What they are suitable for in a library is slightly more mysterious. These carts are sturdy, well made, and presumably purchased using something more than spare change. So far they tend to just sit there in their little parking area, unwanted, and making early indications of being a waste of resources. A complete waste, really, and yet, kafka seems to like them. Two days ago I found kafka laying placidly on his side in one. He does like to get in things, though these are of a design that made me wonder how he even managed to do so. I wondered briefly if someone picked him up and put him in. But the act of leaving him in the cart seems malicious, and kafka seems to have a very good eye for ill intent and for avoiding those harboring it. Plus he is a balletic leaper and certainly could have flowed up into the upper level basket if he were driven enough to assert the completeness of his domain. But seeing him in one of the carts does not mean I had time to interact with him there. Believe it or not I was quite busy with work, and when I looked again later, when I had time, kafka was off on some other business.

Today, though, he was back in a cart. I had some time and so I said hi. Then, seized by either whimsy, the flow of things, telepathic suggestion, or all of the above, I proceeded to, cautiously, very slowly at first, wheel kafka around for a bit in his cart. He was like a little prince. He sat up, and as I wheeled him around on a circuit of our main floor and for a visit to the teen librarian he was constantly admired. Some people pet him. He seemed unusually dignified, even for him. His sitting posture was regal, upright and perfectly balanced. He did not purr, or become affectionate at the petting, but rather seemed to take it all as his due, as a matter of ceremony.
 
At least, that's my story for it. We're talking about a cat here. I could have dreamed it all.

Football terms for shelving errors

I don't know when it started, using football terms to describe shelving issues. I've been here a long time and these terms were mysteriously in place when I began. Do clerks especially love football? Not that I've noticed. Some care about it, some don't. Football is pretty popular these days so we have a few people who are passionate about a team or play in a fantasy league, but most of us care very little about football, or not at all. Nevertheless all the phraseology we use about shelving errors is developed straight out of football terms. I have been unable to track down the source for this, but when we chatter on about shelving issues we use these terms freely, barely even conscious of their explicit football language.

Anyway, because I so enjoy giving you the inside view of the library life I thought I'd share a taste of our secret language of shelving.

1. Halfback. Means a book shoved half back, making the binding hard to see.

2. Fullback. Means a book shoved all the way back. The binding here will be impossible to see. Just to note, quarterback, as a term, is never used, though technically it's quite common, especially when dealing with unnecessary roughness (see below).

3. Unnecessary roughness. This is a general term for very uneven rows and a general lack of tidying of the rows while shelving.

4. Field Goal. Means a book misshelved in between two identical books.

5. Missed the open man. Means when there is a gap from when a book is removed from its correct location, but the item is reshelved, incorrectly, somewhere else leaving the gap to just sit there.

6. Offsides. This is one of the worst errors in terms of causing problems. It means when a book is shelved in advance of its proper position and a whole new series of shelving starts from that reference point, so, like, "A, B, C, D, E, B, C, D, E, F..."

7. Clipping. This means a book shelved with the bookend nestled into its pages.


Until I started writing these out I didn't realize how many there were. I'm stopping here so as not to bore you, but there are actually plenty more of these football shelving terms that we use! Some get a little technical. These will get you started should you decide to make a career of it.

Jesus said all rich people are going to hell

I am not one usually given to the discussion of scriptural issues, but a recent, possibly rash, vow I made to categorically disdain rich people (in a desperate, culturally corrective attempt for balance) led me to a famous quote of Jesus. It's from the New Testament.

" It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

I, like you no doubt, have heard this intensely famous quote before, but I had never bothered to do the simple math on it, the whole "Oh, they're saying two plus two so, um, 2+2, OH! They mean four." So then, here is the simple math.

1. A camel cannot get through the eye of a needle. It has never been done. It is impossible.

2. The kingdom of God is widely considered to be synonymous with the kingdom of heaven.

3. Heaven and Hell is a closed, binary system. If one is not going to heaven one must then go to hell.

4. It is harder than impossible (see 1) for a rich person to go to heaven, therefore

5. All rich people are going to hell.

This is unequivocal. It doesn't matter if it doesn't tend to show up on church signs, and it doesn't matter how many lawyers you can get to lawyer it up. Hell, I'm a decent enough legal thinker to figure out dozens of ways to lawyer up this statement, but that's all just song and dance. The title of my little essay here stands. Jesus said all rich people are going to hell.

Do I say this to tweak the noses of Christians? No! You have misunderstood me. I am no great fan of Christianity it is true. And I can really take or leave Jesus, mostly leave, what with the legacy track record and everything. But despite all of this, or perhaps because of all of this, I find myself delighted to suddenly, here, be on the exact same page as Mr. Christ. Frankly, it's a kind of relief. Until he showed up I was all alone on this one with a tiny, remaining group of radical Marxists. They're all in their 80s and 90s and they kind of freak me out.

5 Wastes of Money at my Library

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Introduction

While I am not inclined to think of libraries as in any way wasting money, and while I think as a general rule we should be plowing money into libraries like they're aircraft carriers making industrialists fantastically wealthy, I am aware of what I consider to be lapses of judgement within our library budgets. In my own library I find us occasionally buying things that, while not necessarily egregious in an absolute sense, can be a bit offensive in the context of our relentless, continually shrinking book purchasing budgets. Very recently we bought half a dozen or so shopping carts. These are nice shopping carts, like for a small to medium size shop at your grocery store. My knee jerk reaction to the arrival of these is "Ahhhh! You fools! You wastrels! You profligate spendthrifts! Have you no sense?", but because I am a master of wisdom I am inclined these days to let my knee jerk reaction marinate, smoke, percolate, and generally be tempered by time. These carts could turn out to be a lot of fun for six year olds, the library cat might like them, we can use them to dispense free lattes to everyone in the fireplace area as a surprise treat. All I'm saying is that I am willing to give them some time before I start rumbling bitterly about how awful they are. Nevertheless, they do put me in mind of some of our previous poor choices that have been shown by time to have been anywhere from ill considered to disastrous. I thought I would share some of these with you. Thus:

The 5 Biggest Money Wasters in my Library's History
 (Modern Era)

1. A very scary Halloween (the spider incident, 1998).

A messy, unhappy Halloween event involving 100 tarantulas, one heart attack, three lawsuits, and a lot of expensive crushed spider (they were supposed to be rentals).

2. The drone solution (2011)

An expensive solution to the problem of the great distance in our library between upstairs reference and the downstairs front desk was ruined by the drones being unable to reliably carry anything bigger than a paperback of Cannery Row, and also by the uncomfortable truth that some librarians are as bad at operating drones as they are at walking.

3. Automation Services Bowling Alley (2009)

What started as a bonus perk became a way of life. Call down to Automation Services at any time, for any reason, and just listen to that background noise. Yep.

4. The Bridges of Madison County Experience Room (1993)

We store weeds and donations in it now, but the seven multimedia projectors and the farmhouse facade cost a lot of money in their day.

5. Staff Blogger (2013)

Oh, I'm not paid to blog? Well then, er, good call.

Tortoise and the Hare Clerking Part 4: The Machine!

This is a running series of Tortoise and the Hare comparisons of the different stations of my job. I have not updated this with a new post in so long that even longtime readers will be left faintly confused. They might ask "I don't remember this stuff. Is this series from before the internet when your blog was mimeographed and deposited in my mailbox?"  If they did ask this I would have answered  "Mimeographed? Huh, I don't, it was, oh, you're joking! Oh you!" Actually, I wouldn't say anything like that. I'd say something incredibly hilarious back, but I can't think of what it would be here because of a cut on my finger.

Anyway, if you missed, or forgot this ancient series you can see my introductory blogpost for more explanation here. But that's really unnecessary because, briefly, it is a cross comparison of how the different aspects of my job respectively suit the slow and steady worker (tortoise) and the volatile sprinter/loafer worker (hare).

So then, the machine.

As you may or may not know we have a giant automated check in machine. One to three hours a day we work tending this machine. There has never been any part of my job more perfectly suited for the hare, more exactly designed to the strengths of the sprinter/loafer worker than this so called Automated Materials Handling machine. And, as you may guess (Wait! Don't read further. See if you can guess! Ready? I'm going to continue, do you have your guess?), the hare's opposite, the tortoise, is exquisitely ill suited to the machine. Perhaps the main reason for all of this is one of balance. The machine is an almost perfect expression of the tortoise. It is stolid, untiring, relentless, slow, and steady. The exhaust, so to speak, of all its industry is erratic, uneven, and almost randomly overwhelming or non existent. If you try to slowly and steadily keep up with the machine you will, figuratively, but conceivably literally, be ground into the machine's giant maw. Crunched up like a bit of lettuce. I have seen tortoises (no, not real animal tortoises, but what fun that would be!) steadily feeding books into the machine while so many things are amiss with it that their actions are incapable of producing any positive result, almost like if they were putting books on a cart and someone took the cart away, but they continued to put the books on the cart, imagining constructive activity as their books dropped absurdly to the ground at their feet. A hare, spending five minutes frantically attending to the machine's problems in that above mentioned problem situation, will produce so much more positive numbers of work than the plodding tortoise worker will in two hours of steady labor that the hare could go lock themselves in the bathroom and shoot up heroin for the remainder of their work assignment and still come out on top.

The point here is not that hares use smack. Hares don't use smack! Nor is it that tortoises are stupid. It is that some work situations are very much better for one archetype than the other. The best worker should probably have at least a bit of both the tortoise and the hare in them. Or, this is unfair because we only have evidence of the machine as so much one way. So, as far as my job goes, you'd better have at least a bit of the hare in you to draw on, or, when your time comes on the machine, you will suck.

To recap and sum up:

1. I find jokes about mimeographs only very faintly funny.

2. It stands to reason that our materials handling machine is of the family Testudines, along with terrapins and turtles.

3. No one to our knowledge is "shooting up" in our staff bathrooms.

4. This is in no way meant as a contest. Tortoises and hares are both endowed with valuable skills and approaches. Though I did not mention it, under the right circumstances (machine humming along beautifully, quiet day, lots of boxes to process) a good tortoise can get a lot done on the machine.

5. Hares are so great on the machine that if a tortoise were to challenge them to a race on the machine they could start, get a nice lead, and totally take a long nap if they wanted.

two true

I was reading a book of essays by Gish Jen for my customary, per book average of 18 minutes reading, total, and I fixated on a small story she told. It was about a colleague of hers, I believe one of Chinese descent, who said she decided to write novels because she didn't like to go out, and it seemed like something she could do at home. Gish Jen took this story to illustrate some point about cultural differences between east and west that was part of the greater discussion of her essays. And her point was no doubt true in its way, I mean, she seemed like she thought these things through carefully. But I was struck in a completely different way by the story. I found it to be a story of someone telling rough truth, casual truth. And I thought about it. And it made me think that, quite often, in any truth, there is the casual version, and the fancy version. Both may be true, or one at one moment, one at another. Or sometimes neither of them really get it, and underneath is the real truth.

Shall I illustrate?

We will use the question "Do you like working at the Library?"

Fancy Truth: "I love Libraries. They are one of the great wonders of our world. My job is often fun and interesting. I like the vast majority of the people I come across. If I have to work, and I'm pretty sure I do, this is, in many ways, a fantastic and honorable place to do it. I love helping to bring this place to life and I feel lucky to work here."

Casual Truth: "No."

Fancy truth is for Politicians, people getting along in the world, formal occasions, not offending, and looking at things in a conventional way. Sometimes it is a way to take care of oneself. Casual, or rough truth is good for comedians, cutting to the quick, and expressiveness. Either can be lied with, and not be true at all. Both can be true or whole or right, temporarily, for just a moment, or most of the time. But, yes, both can be, in their ways, a bit on the surface of things. And sometimes neither will quite do. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, we must dive underneath to search for the real truth, the deep truth.

I will continue to illustrate.

"Do you like working at the Library?"

Deep Truth: Three hundred blog posts in, and I am still answering.

Japanese and Jewish joke

Recently I was writing a piece about the power in the essence of things. And at the start of the piece I was telling a story I heard in a lecture. This story made me think of a joke my father used to tell that I always really loved, but I couldn't tell you that joke at that point because it was a huge digression, and I had important things to say. Luckily, today, I have nothing important to say, so I was thinking maybe I could tell you the joke now. Would that be okay? Please indicate agreement by continuing to read. Indicate disagreement by typing the search term of your choice into the search box at the top of your screen and hitting the "enter" key.

So, first, I will refresh your memory of the story I heard at the lecture. It's a story from a 17th or 18th century Japanese painting. In it a wealthy, successful poet goes to seek wisdom from some wacky sage who lives in a tree. After much travel he finds this prophet or sage or whatever he is, up in a tree, and the poet asks the guy in the tree what the meaning of life is. The prophet in the tree says something like "Be nice to people." This makes the poet pretty mad. He says "Do you know who I am? I came all this way seeking your wisdom and you give me some crappy platitude? Anyone could have told me to be nice to people!"

The sage says "It is very easy to say, but very hard to do."

So, that's not exactly a joke, though it's a little funny, but it is very similar, interestingly, to this joke my father told me. Curiously, my joke is a Jewish joke, but that won't be entirely apparent as a written joke. The final line is spoken with a Yiddish accent, so, if you're up for it, try to remember to do one in your head when you read the last line to yourself.

The more I think of these two sort-of-jokes the more I suspect they are two cultures take on the same thing, though I think the Jewish one is more subtle and curiously more Zen than the Japanese one. Okay, you've waited long enough, here is the joke:

There is a man with all the trappings of worldly success. He has much wealth, is accomplished in his field, and happily married. He himself thinks he is happy, until one day he hears a story about the wisest sage, a person of infinite wisdom, who lives far from civilization and is reputed to have all the answers. Learning of this sage causes this man to start wondering about the meaning of his life, indeed about the meaning of life in general. He eventually becomes so restless and unhappy that he resolves to track down this great sage and find out the meaning of life. His quest takes him to every continent. Disasters befall him. He loses everyone he held dear, but still he seeks. With his money nearly gone, his health shot, and the remnants of his youth becoming a distant glimmer, the man hears rumor of the sage he seeks living on top of a mountain in an obscure area of the Himalayas. He travels all over the Himalayas until, a mere shell of his former self, he finds the mountain the sage lives on top of. With his last strength he manages to climb the mountain and, sure enough, at the top, he finds an ancient sage sitting calmly on top of the wind blown peak.

"Oh great sage!" The man says "I have come across many oceans and searched every continent for you. I beg you, will you answer my one question? What, what is the meaning of life?"

"Life is a fountain." The sage replies.

The man considers. The man is flabbergasted. "I have given up great riches, a happy life, my health, my youth, my family, everything! I have suffered untold hardships and years of privation to find you, and you tell me "Life is a fountain"!!!

The sage looks at him, slightly startled "It's not a fountain?"

A library mission statement

Yesterday my wife and I were at a lecture at our local museum. It was about eccentricity in Japanese Painting. It was okay. But two things from it stick with me. One was about how in 17th or 18th century Japan, Zen Buddhism was very powerful and corrupt, and a new Zen school came in from China with a kind of back to basics focus, centered on the principle that desire makes you unhappy. It had great impact and influence. The other thing that stuck with me was a story, in a painting from this same period, about a wealthy, successful poet who goes to seek wisdom from some wacky sage who lives in a tree. After much travel he finds this prophet or sage or whatever he is, up in a tree, and the poet asks the guy in the tree what the meaning of life is. The prophet in the tree says something like "Be nice to people." This makes the poet pretty mad. He says "Do you know who I am? I came all this way seeking your wisdom and you give me some crappy platitude? Anyone could have told me to be nice to people!"

The sage says "It is very easy to say, but very hard to do."

All this got me thinking about how there is a great power in reducing back to the distilled essence of something. If you can get it right, at that simple level, all the energy that has sprawled out in its interpretations and applications comes back with massive power into a single, pre big bang like point. I am reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan and think it's just great. Part of why it is so great is because it does just this. He says "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." and it is a key of power. It takes all the energy of a hundred years of madness about food, takes it all back to something almost absurdly simple, and unlocks a great door, and a wise and interesting book.

Walking around my Library, with, as I often do, Library thoughts swirling through my head, I thought, what would this essence be in the describing of our Libraries, these places with all their computer classes and programming and coffee shops and games and meeting spaces and wifi and outreach and technological gimmickry? I know we're not talking about fundamentally corrupt institutions with Libraries, were talking about largely wonderful institutions, but I often feel like the core of where I work does get a little forgotten in all its ever growing peripheries and expansions. I wondered what there would be in naming this essential core of a Library, what it would feel like. Here is my try:

Get as many good books as you can, put them in a place you can read and keep them, and make them as readily available as possible.

Ideas that are horses

Having burst into this day by drinking two large cappuccinos I have had no problem generating an excellent idea for today's blog post. Indeed I have generated at least seven ideas so far, and you would have loved each one. Really. Very insightful they were, passionate, rip roaring, funny, illuminating stuff. Unfortunately each one of these fabulous ideas has gone racing through my fevered and caffeinated brain like a wild horse on a rampage of power. There is the horse, and it is beautiful and wild and perfect. It runs by in a blaze of ferocious glory, and it's gone. Could I even have seen such perfection? I don't know because the only notes I have on my ideas look like this:

Liyuan Library, triumph of print!

Librarians and Journalists!!!

cell phones advancement to past.

great lives and not trying.

It doesn't look like so much there, does it? I have a vague sense of what each one was supposed to be about, an echo of the thrilling rolling thuds of their hoof-beats, a heart piercing flash of a vision of their rolled back wild eyes and me standing astonished among the dunes and wild grasses.

Ah, well, written or not, great or not, they would have all disappeared to the west, toward the sea. Whether I could have read my vision over again as bona fide art, or just remember them as fading, fearsome and mighty dreams, they go, and are gone.

And that is how it is. Life is the disabusement of our ideas of how things should be. But I do not despair. I don't even feel sad, oddly enough. I have my scraps of the tiny pieces of my ideas. I will go track down some of those horses on the dunes. And no doubt I will even manage to reconstruct a few of those pieces for you to read here. They'll probably be worse than their original, brilliant, racing visions, but that's how it usually is anyway. And yet too, they could be better than all my wild imaginations. Greatness. Though I sometimes do, it has never been for me to say.

Oh weather!

Don't get me wrong, I am happy to stand around talking about the weather until our toes start to hurt, turn blue, and, finally, detach. Weather is something everyone can share in, discuss at any level, and have real feelings about. But it is also non controversial at heart, hard to go on too long about, and is surprisingly grounding. My one regular email correspondence is at least one third concerning weather, always an easy "go to" subject of interest to us both. Nevertheless, on this day, our first really ungodly cold day of this winter season (the temperature here in Minnesota is at minus 4 degrees and will be getting colder), when people say to me "It's cold out!" I have felt compelled to reply "Not in here is isn't."

And it isn't. As I write I am experiencing roughly the same temperature as you are wherever you are, unless, maybe, you're reading this on a cell phone in a parking lot or garden or something. But then, even if you are doing that, it is probably in the 70s out in your parking lot, and not raining, just like it is in here, otherwise you'd probably go inside. But I think all this only actually illustrates the need for us to talk about the weather more. It would be way too easy for us to simply and finally lose all touch with the genuine, wild world we live in and all its wonderful local differences and variety. The only other solution I could think of besides talking about the weather would be to go out in it.

Did I mention that it's minus four out? We'll just talk.

Display cube madness

I have previously spoken of the librarian who chooses display books based almost entirely on the books being hardcover and the fact that they are very very close to where the particular display spot is. My bitterness about this seems to be a reflection of the fact that her functionally random choices appear to be quite popular and successful, with their fingers right on the pulse of the reading public, while my rogue choices for the same displays, chosen based on a ferocious love of the books involved and on nothing else, go pretty much nowhere. I am now sad to report that her school of display also seems to be in full force out on our themed display cubes. These display cubes are a series of large shelving cubes that feature spotlighted collections of books. I think they're supposed to make up for the fact that without them you'd have to travel several miles from the front doors of my library before you would get to any actual flesh and blood (paper and glue?) books. So I experienced a not unfamiliar shock of horror and recognition when I yesterday looked at the contents of the cube called "Great Lives".

I actually doubt that the "Great Lives" display cube is being stocked by the same librarian whose fiction choices so disturb and confound me, but there is little doubt that it is being stocked along those same theoretical lines. Do they teach this in Library School? Rule one: When stocking any kind of library display always pretend you are in a retail store and trying to sell stuff. Rule two: Conserve your energy! Whatever the source for this approach I am forced to admit that these books seemed to be selling, er, circulating, pretty good. The "Great Lives" display had the look of something doing a brisk business. Fortunately there were still plenty of "Great Lives" to check out. Herewith are some of our featured great lives:

Christopher Milne. Being the inspiration for Christopher Robin at age six may be a tenuous link to greatness, but I would like to grow my conception of greatness if I can. Who knows? I'm pretty sure Pooh thought he was great.

Brock Lesnar. Okay, despite what I said in the comments about Christopher Milne I would totally make fun of Brock Lesnar, a professional wrestler, for being on this cube of great lives. But I won't out of respect for my many, many readers who are great fans of Professional Wrestling. Nevertheless I cannot resist noting that in all the pictures on the internet that I reviewed of Brock Lesnar in order to become properly acquainted with him, he looks far too angry to be leading a great life.

Rob Lowe. I actually really enjoyed West Wing, which I believe is the last TV show I was able to watch in its entirety. Nevertheless, in this context of greatness, I am concerned with his history of legal troubles with former nannies.

Ralph Lauren. I don't like rich people. This probably sounds silly to you as a blanket (available in the Ralph Lauren , English Isles Collection) statement, but I feel it is a necessary corrective in our world. As soon as our world becomes less relentlessly groveling I will revisit this rich person/Ralph Lauren issue. As a side note though I found it strangely interesting that the Wikipedia page for Brock Lesnar is vastly longer than the one for Ralph Lauren.

Laura Bush. This is actually the one that so horrified me I had to write this whole, vast commentary about our "Great Lives" display. But with my outrage mellowed both by time and by the consideration required to write lucidly, I am able to look at the following mitigating factors without passing out. First, she was a librarian. I am thinking this might have leaped out at the selecting librarian as desperately appealing. And though I would figure this is the sort of commonality you would want to bury under the rug with all your old copies of Men are From Mars Women are From Venus I am able to understand the impulse. Two, the librarian had wildly overstocked the "Great Lives" with biographies of men, and where else were they going to find a woman of the stature of a Brock Lesnar!

Adolph Hitler. Yes. Adolph Hitler. Oddly I only even found this one after I was so outraged by Laura Bush and was merely collecting the names of an assortment of other "Great" people on the cube. Dave, my colleague, believes this to be the work of an evil prankster, but I don't believe it. It's not like the book was pro Hitler, and besides, our resident patron Nazi has not been around for months. Oh, and I just went to look it up and the book in question has had its status appropriately changed for being on the cube, which pretty well seals the deal here. As an explanation, I think the librarian who chose this was merely focusing on the "Memoirs and Biographies" subtitle of the "Great Lives" cube, and was also using the term "Great" more in its meaning as "Large" which also helps explain the inclusion of Brock Lesnar, who is 286 pounds!

When I was discussing all this with one of my most excellent colleagues she told me she was given the advice in Library School to never recommend things she loved, because when the patron didn't like them you would hate that person too much to be able to help them anymore. Setting aside just how horribly twisted that advice is, it does make me wonder, what does one say when the patron comes back and says "I loved reading about the great lives of Hitler, Laura Bush, and Brock Lesnar! Oh guide me more wise librarian!"

Cat jealousy

The library cat, kafka, belongs to himself and to the Library. But I sometimes get jealous of all his other friends. Though I am perhaps most responsible for this cat, many people have taken him on as someone to watch out for and take care of. Yesterday I found kafka with an old man in a corner of the newspaper area. I have known the man for many, many years. He is rough and a bit ragged, always striking me as one of those people on some edge of homelessness. I don't think I have ever exchanged a word with him, and I've never seen him check out Library material. He had laid out large sheets of newspaper in front of him, presumably not the library's, and was hand feeding kafka sardines, with those newspapers protecting our carpet. There was no shyness in kafka as he ate, and the two of them seemed peaceable together, and settled, perhaps even practiced, in their exchange. That jealous part of me wanted to find something officious, or something wrong about it. Sometimes it is hard to tell if we are succumbing, or being responsible. 

I crouched at a respectful distance.

"Those are water packed?" I asked.

The man nodded with a strange shyness. I nodded back and returned to shelving. Actually, I was a bit jealous of them both.

Good art bad art

As a person of strong opinions, aye, ferocious, sometimes terrifying opinions, I have had to step back on occasion and reflect on the idea of good art vs. bad art. To wit, is there really, in the end, good art and bad art? Is there an absolute, objective evaluation anywhere to be had, as it so feels like there must be, or is every shred of greatness and love or loathing held privately, one at a time, in each individual heart?

Well?

Oh, right, I must answer my own questions here.

I don't know. Over the years I answer it one way and I answer it another, but no way sticks.

On the one hand I become certain there is some weird god somewhere who can tell me there is an absolute difference between the loathsome Berenstain Bears and Dr Seuss, Garfield and Peanuts, Dark Knight Rises and The Godfather, Thomas Kinkade and John Constable, Heaven Is For Real and, well, anything, I am beside myself with choices here. And yet for each of these clear choices there are people facing the opposite direction from me. They stand rapt at their beloved Thomas Kinkade print, they obsessively pester the children's librarians for more Garfield or Berenstain Bears while the complete collection of Peanuts remains largely undisturbed these days, upstairs, in adult non fiction. They've read Heaven Is For Real seven times, and they failed to notice that Dark Knight Rises was profoundly bad. Oops. I mean, er, they really loved that Batman movie, Dark Knight Rises. Am I just supposed to say they're wrong? Well, I mean after I say they're wrong, are they actually wrong?

Oops, I think we're sort of back where we started.

Let's try another angle. Let's talk Libraries. What fun! Libraries are very much in on this discussion. After all, a Library is constantly forced to answer some version of this question. It it the job of a public library to provide materials strictly based on popularity, are we advanced scouts for popularity (it got good reviews, so we think it will be popular), can we advocate in hopes something we think is great will be popular? Is it our responsibility to decide some things are great and keep them in disproportion to their circulation and use?

Perhaps there is an answer with the critics. The really powerful critics, the deep ones, avoid the whole good and bad thing. They take the "bad" art, and, examining it, expose all its vacuous lies, its deception and meaninglessness. With the "good" art they start pulling truth out of it like its a magic hat. After that, you're on your own.

And maybe that's as close as we can get. There are things the closer you get and the deeper you look the richer and more profound and beautiful and wonderful they get, and there are things the closer you look, the emptier they get, until, eventually, you are staring into nothing.

Fell in love with a painting

On Friday, I fell in love with a painting.

I will resist comparing it, which is one of my weaknesses, as in, it is the seventh greatest painting ever, by the 43rd best painter. It is better than Caspar David Friedrich, but not so good as Caravaggio. It is the best painting of Mountains ever and the eighth best nature scene. Oh Bah! I say even as I attempt to place it somehow, shout its virtues, exult, advocate, justify, explain, place, convey, elevate. 

But maybe there is no more than this: 

I love this painting. 

Well, there is always a little more.

Very early in the morning I was walking through a temporary show of Japanese Art at my local museum. I had seen the show before, but this time it was so quiet, perhaps because it was dawn, of all strange and mysterious times to be in a museum, and I had seen the painting before and liked it very much, but this time was different. This time I looked at it. And then I kept looking at it. And then I looked at it some more. And the more I looked at the painting the better the painting seemed to get, the deeper I fell into it. The more I felt the air of it, cold and clear and slightly damp. The more real became the rising mist, the splash of water, the ragged stone and everlasting cliffs, the tiny great trees standing above an abyss of a mountain gorge falling forever below. I spied the rough little houses on the brief, high mountain plateau, bordering a fierce little stream, and I saw the path that climbed out of the plateau to disappear into the mysterious passes above. I walked the path.

What is the painting? 

South Mountain in China by Fukui Kotei. Oh, you have not heard of him? You have never heard of the great, immortal Fukui Kotei? Who has not heard of Fukui Kotei!? Whose education has been so neglected? What theft of spirit and magic, inspiration and illumination has been stolen so from those not hearing of Fukui Kotei and South Mountain in China? 

Don't worry. Or worry with me, for I hadn't heard of Fukui Kotei either, and still know little about him. And here I was thinking that we had heard of everyone great, knew all their stories, had our chance at them all. But it turns out the world is nothing like that. Another surprise for us both, forgotten delights everywhere. The painting is all ink, black, with two smaller areas splashed with white, both in the places where there are waterfalls. And all of it is on gold leaf. The painting is black ink over gold, and the gold has a way of being luxurious and dazzling in that way gold has, but it also has a fabulous way of receding, becoming even more tensionless behind and in the black than all the whites we are used to in this sort of work. And so the world it creates becomes somehow more present. Once you cross the border, the plane of the painting, and enter it, you are more fully in it. You are disappeared into gold itself. The whole thing is on two, continuous, six panel screens, almost six feet high and running right to left for well over 20 feet. Would you like to see it?

So would I. But I am not in the same room as it, and so we both must be deprived of that pleasure.

Oh you, me, with our fancy looking-glass internet, our books of all the art history, all our magical photography, and all the lies that everything is known. Here is one for us. This piece cannot be photographed, or, it can be, but little will be left of it. It must be seen, in body and space, and there is nothing else for it.

Why there are no great cat books

In a very recent post I spoke happily of kafka, the Library cat, and how he seems to be turning out very well indeed as he grows up. But some part of me thinks it sort of begs the question "And what cat doesn't turn out well?" Faced with that question I am at a loss. As far as my experience of them goes, all cats, in one way or another, turn out well. And so, with this, I think I have stumbled upon the answer to a riddle that has perplexed me for some years.

The riddle is this: Why are there several great dog books, but no great cat books?

Among the great dog books I can count offhand is The Dog Who Wouldn't Be by Farley Mowat, Uncle Boris in the Yukon and Other Shaggy Dog Stories by Daniel Pinkwater, The One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith and, possibly, Call of the Wild by Jack London. Also the entire Peanuts ouvre, though Snoopy as a dog, after the first ten years or so of the strip, is a rather questionable proposition.

Among the great cat books there is nothing. We have maybe the Cheshire cat in Alice's Adventures, but we're already well into Snoopy territory there, and there's a couple picture books I like. One of my favorite authors of all time, Ursula K. LeGuin, wrote a series about cats with wings. I don't not recommend it. And after that I am at a complete loss.

So what's the deal?

Here is my theory. Dogs are more variable and impressionable than cats. There are great dogs and crappy dogs. There are nice dogs and mean dogs. This kind of variability is useful for storytelling. Also these dogs, while by no means devoid of their own personalities, have a kind of receptivity. They readily take on the qualities of things around them. Nazis, or Conquistadors can have dogs and they become evil dogs. Daniel Pinkwater or Farley Mowat can have dogs and they are no doubt winning dogs. Surely there are plenty of exceptions to this, and a story about a southern police attack dog during the civil rights protests who refuses to menace the marchers might make for a very nice story, but all that only reinforces my point. And my point is that there is a lot of room with dogs, a lot of room in dogs, for us to broadcast, project, and fill out our stories and visions. Dogs will happily blend in with all that. They will drink it up, roll around in it and cover themselves with it. Hold it out to them and they will come running, tongue wagging. Hold that story crap out to a cat and it will start cleaning itself. It will give you a look that at first you will think is contempt, but then you will slowly start to wonder if you have any idea at all about what was in that cat look. It is not interested in your vision of the world. It is confident in its own. It does not welcome your narrative, it is busy with its own. And its own narrative is one we can admire or even totally love, but it is difficult to plagiarize, exploit or borrow, perhaps partly because it is slightly alien to our ideal cadences.

Or so my new found theory goes. It may be right, or partly right. But then, on the other hand, I can only count, what, like five great dog books? Perhaps its just a matter of luck and alchemy. Perhaps it's mere chance that no one has hit it, just so, with a cat book. Perhaps we should not give up hope yet. It may, one day, happen.

The blogger calls on the gods

Sometimes I am walking around with my pockets stuffed full of blog ideas. It's a little like having my pockets full of cash, a nice, ready for anything feeling. Then I have a period where I'm writing all the time, and go through all the really appealing ideas, until I'm left with the equivalent of a pocket full of nickels. I also get left with all the really super long and challenging to write essay ideas, so, to continue the money analogy then, I have a pocket full of nickels and a couple large denomination bills in an obscure, foreign currency.

This is where I am right now. Nothing in my pockets of real use. But I do not despair when I come to this point. I merely put my order in with the gods. You wouldn't think it, but the gods are actually pretty good about answering, especially if you keep your requests modest. Here is today's order: I would like a very nice, neat little blog idea, nothing fancy, one that makes me feel quite witty, and takes about 12 minutes to write because I have to be at the Library front desk in 12 minutes.

I will wait here. I expect to hear soon.